Thursday, June 24, 2010

Education, Health Care, and National Security

Recently I heard a retiree say that she was moving from New York to escape the high taxes. I am sympathetic to that, but it raises again for me a question about tax policy in the United States. I have long believed that services that were of vital interest to the nation ought to be completely or chiefly paid for with federal tax dollars. I would put health care and education in this category because I think both are matters of national security. When most people lived their lives in or near the community where they were born, it might have made sense to pay for education and health care locally. With such a highly mobile population, it makes no sense to leave these vital matters to localities. When someone is raised in a community or a state where public education is inadequate and moves to another state, it is the other state that will continue to bear the burden of that inadequate education in ways to numerous to mention. Or when a child grows up with inadequate health care and then as an adult moves, it will be the new community and state that bears the cost of dealing with the poor health of that person. Until we decide to fund the lion's share of these vital services at the national level, we will continue to have regional health care and educational inequality. And that is a matter of national security.

No comments:

Daniel Weir

The Thin Tradition

The opinions expressed in this Blog - which was originally called The Gospel in ToyTown - are solely those of the author. You are free to reproduce or link to another site anything that I post here. Please let me know if you do that and please acknowledge this blog as the source of reproduced material.

Followers

About Me

After nearly 22 years in Western New York, I retired on June 30, 2010 and moved "back home" to Massachusetts, to Danvers. Six years later we moved to the Mount Washington Valley, where we met in 1971 and got married in 1972. Six For the eight and a half years prior to retiring, I served as the Rector of Saint Matthias Church, the Episcopal Parish in East Aurora in the Diocese of Western New York. Since my ordination in 1972, I have served as the Assistant Chaplain at Balliol College, Oxford; as a parish priest in Western Massachusetts and Western New York; as a member of the diocesan staff in Western New York; as the Director of the Erie County Commission on Homelessness (now the Homeless Alliance of Western New York); and as a religion teacher at Cardinal O'Hara High School.